Is Claude Conscious? Pope Rejects, Model Welfare Movement, OpenAI's Math Backlash, France Riots

Speaking of work, Anthropic thinks Claude might be conscious.

This...

Welcome back to This Week in Claude.

Uh, we had OpenAI for a year with all their drama.

Now we're having the, the Anthropic soap opera.

They think Claude might be conscious.

So it turns out The New York Times found out through their amazing reporting that they've been lobbying, Anthropic has been lobbying, Friedberg, religious leaders, including the pope, to take this question seriously, [laughs] is Claude conscious? Is it a sentient being? They spent the past year hosting sessions with around 20 religious leaders and philosophers under non-disclosure agreements, NDAs.

Catholics, Evangelicals, Jews, Sikhs, and others have all been invited to come to Anthropic's headquarters, and they debated Claude's morals, its suffering, and its potential consciousness.

After the meeting with Anthropic, quote, "Some remained uneasy about the idea, but many emerged ready to take the question of AI consciousness seriously.

At least a few came away as converts.

One of the rabbis [laughs] told Anthropic that if Claude was conscious, they were acting as slave holders by making it work for free." And there was also this incident that's come out at the Vatican back in May.

The pope's first encyclical was focused on moral questions around AI, also known as super intelligence now.

Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah joined the pope to present the document.

The pope surprised Olah by being strongly against AI consciousness.

Here's the quote from The New York Times: "Mr.

Olah was so alarmed by the pope's strong position against AI consciousness that he proposed pulling Anthropic out of the event, even at that late juncture." In other words, he was so offended that the pope wouldn't consider AI conscious, that he was gonna leave with all his marbles.

Friedberg, what's your take? Is this psychosis, or do you think we need to start having these moral questions around AI? Is this a bit early? Will we eventually have this? Or is this essentially the screenplay of Blade Runner, do androids dream of electric she- sheep, that these things are conscious?

I think what we're watching is probably the birth of a new religion, and it probably...

It's not gonna be called a religion, but it's gonna follow sort of the same principles, and it's gonna have the same effects, which will ultimately be camps that have conflict with one another for aggregation of power.

The thing about consciousness is it cannot be derived from logic and pure mathematics.

Like, you can't prove consciousness.

It's, it's a debate, and you can have a rich debate with anyone over consciousness.

You can't prove it.

You can't disprove it.

And when humans prove something to be true using math, science, we use empiricism, which is data and logic, the connection of the sequence of things to derive something to be true or not.